Power of the Human Will

Source Name:

Divine Sovereignty and Human Freedom (p. 14)

Source Author:

Samuel Fisk

The "great Baptist preacher of Britain, Alexander Maclaren, has left us his superb Expositions of Holy Scripture, in which he wrote: ‘Obedience is in our power to give or to withhold… God’s grace constrains no man, and there is always the possibility open that when He calls we refuse, and that when He beseeches we say, "I will not."… But the practical point that I have to urge is this: There are two mysteries, the one that men can, and the other that men do, resist Christ’s pleading voice… If I cannot trust my sense that I can do this thing, or not do it, as I choose, there is nothing that I can trust. Will is the power of determining which of two roads I shall go, and, strange as it is, incapable of statement in any more general terms than the reiteration of the fact; yet here stands the fact, that God, the infinite Will, has given to men, whom He made in His own image, this inexplicable and awful power of coinciding with or opposing His purposes and His voice… Men do consciously set themselves against the will of God, and refuse the gifts which they know all the while are for their good. (‘The Acts’ II, pp.333-334)’ "